By Tom Ue. Director Aoife McArdle discusses the making of Kissing Candice, a film that follows the titular character (Ann Skelly), a 17-year-old, who aspires to escape the boredom of her town and who finds solace in her imagination. Dreams and realities collide when she meets Jacob (Ryan Lincoln), about whom she dreamed and when they […]

Film Scratches focuses on the world of experimental and avant-garde film, especially as practiced by individual artists. It features a mixture of reviews, interviews, and essays. A Review by David Finkelstein. In Anál-isis Callejero (Street Anal-ysis), Chilean filmmaker Pablo Molina Guerrero’s nine minute meditation on political violence, we see a complex montage of footage from clashes between […]

Film Scratches focuses on the world of experimental and avant-garde film, especially as practiced by individual artists. It features a mixture of reviews, interviews, and essays. A Review by David Finkelstein. In Hurricane, Carla Forte’s powerful 5 and a half minute dance film in black and white, all of the footage is inside of a soft, circular […]

A Book Review by Tony Williams. The title of this review is not accidental. It is deliberately meant to evoke the title of that 1978 book by Charlton Heston, The Actor’s Life: Journals 1956-1976, but with the definite article changed to emphasize the fact that many actors, not all of them major stars, also have […]

A Book Review by John Duncan Talbird. In Thom Anderson’s documentary, Los Angeles Plays Itself (2003), the history and culture of L.A. is narrated over film clips from other movies. For nearly three hours, this captivating documentary shows how Los Angeles, when it hasn’t “played itself” in the history of movies, has stood in for […]

By Tom Ue. Actress and director Karen Allen may be best known for her performance as the fearless heroine Marion Ravenwood in Steven Spielberg’s Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981), a role that she reprised in Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (2008); but she has a remarkable career on stage, in […]

By Jeremy Carr. Based solely on his latest string of features – Happy-Go-Lucky (2008), Another Year (2010), Mr. Turner (2014) – one might reasonably assume all Mike Leigh films are mostly comical snippets of cockney quirkiness and bubbly English pleasantry. It doesn’t take much to see this hasn’t always been the case, however. Far from it. […]

A Book Review by Yun-hua Chen. Christopher Lupke’s The Sinophone Cinema of Hou Hsiao-hsien: Culture, Style, Voice, and Motion (Cambria, 2016) is a well-informed book straddling between the disciplines of Chinese Studies and Film Studies and is highly relevant to film buffs, sinophiles, film researchers, and students. By contextualising Hou Hsiao-hsien’s oeuvres within the historical, […]

By Tony Williams. Criterion initially offered Rebecca (1940) on a 2-disc DVD edition in 2001 but following loss of copyright a few years later it became an expensive collector’s item, according to my colleague Chris Weedman. Now they have reissued this version in a new format retaining some of the earlier features but adding some […]